Changing history

[Drich]

You are right about taking jobs from the white man out west, but their was also an added benfit for slave owers to set up shop in a territory rather than a full blown state, and that was their tax burden did not carry over.

[Rhondazvous]

I'm starting to feel like I am saying something wrong, with so many of you almost agreeing with me or out right agreeing with me.

It is rather odd, isn't it. I remember you gave me a kudos the other day and I was totally discombobulated. Had to get my smelling salts, in fact.

AF is just not one of those forums where you can tell one corny joke and wind up on everybody's eternal hate list. That's why I like it here.

[Minimalist]

I'm really busy today but I wanted to pop in to dispute Drippy's point here.

because the southern stated provided those materials so inexpensively (no lablor costs)

That's a serious over-simplification.  In 1860 unless you were a member of the plantation class in the south or the entrepreneurial class in the north life pretty much sucked.  While it is true that the slaves were not paid they did have to be fed, housed and clothed and if one died it represented a definite loss of a capital asset to the slave-owner.  Sure, a slave-owner could beat the shit out of a slave if he wanted to but you can buy a car and beat on it with a hammer, too.  What's the point?  You're wrecking your own property.  Now, in the north the Irish/German immigrants who made up the bulk of the working class were paid a pittance in wages and from that they had to meet all of their needs because the factory owners weren't chipping in.  Common laborers worked 60 hours a week for less than $1 a day.  No wonder they lived ten to a room in fire-trap slums.  BTW, if they got sick they were fired and replaced by the next guy off the boat.

Now these same noble factory owners were the ones out there forming the new republican party and demanding the abolition of slavery....but they cheerfully maintained the "vision" of what labor should be until the growth of labor unions in the 20th century and Teddy Roosevelt smacked them in the teeth.  

Slavery would probably have collapsed of its own inefficiency without the civil war.  Once the plantation owners realized they were losing money by supporting them instead of freeing them and paying them shit they would have figured it out real fast.

[Rhondazvous]

The US obviously didn't need slavery. In fact it only became an economic superpower when it was abolished. I think there are several good arguments that slavery actually retarded development, both in the US and globally. When you have access to cheap slave labor you have no incentive to create labor saving systems of devices and I think it is not a coincidence that those were invented around the time of the abolition of slavery. In fact Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, made this very same argument. Also lots of countries had just as much invested in slavery. Look at how many slaves were in the British or French empires and they let them go without a war. This is just moral excuse making.

No the US and no other country needed slavery, ever.

While it's true that slavery does cripple a nation's economy, it was hard for them to realize that. For a while in the early 1800s slavery was dying out because it just wasn't cost-effective for small farmers to keep slaves. Then commercial use of the cotton gin spread and made it possible to create large, labor-intensive plantations. Plantation owners realized they could increase their profits if they didn't have to pay everybody, so slavery came back with a vengeance.

No country needs slavery and yet, the structure of the world market is based on the world-wide slave trade.

[Rhondazvous]

I'm really busy today but I wanted to pop in to dispute Drippy's point here.

because the southern stated provided those materials so inexpensively (no lablor costs)

That's a serious over-simplification.  In 1860 unless you were a member of the plantation class in the south or the entrepreneurial class in the north life pretty much sucked.  While it is true that the slaves were not paid they did have to be fed, housed and clothed and if one died it represented a definite loss of a capital asset to the slave-owner.  Sure, a slave-owner could beat the shit out of a slave if he wanted to but you can buy a car and beat on it with a hammer, too.  What's the point?  You're wrecking your own property.  Now, in the north the Irish/German immigrants who made up the bulk of the working class were paid a pittance in wages and from that they had to meet all of their needs because the factory owners weren't chipping in.  Common laborers worked 60 hours a week for less than $1 a day.  No wonder they lived ten to a room in fire-trap slums.  BTW, if they got sick they were fired and replaced by the next guy off the boat.

Now these same noble  factory owners were the ones out there forming the new republican party and demanding the abolition of slavery....but they cheerfully maintained the "vision" of what labor should be until the growth of labor unions in the 20th century and Teddy Roosevelt smacked them in the teeth.  

Slavery would probably have collapsed of its own inefficiency without the civil war.  Once the plantation owners realized they were losing money by supporting them instead of freeing them and paying them shit they would have figured it out real fast.

What do you mean "would have?"

Didn't they?

[Minimalist]

No.  Slavery in the south ended at bayonet point.

[CapnAwesome]

The US obviously didn't need slavery. In fact it only became an economic superpower when it was abolished. I think there are several good arguments that slavery actually retarded development, both in the US and globally. When you have access to cheap slave labor you have no incentive to create labor saving systems of devices and I think it is not a coincidence that those were invented around the time of the abolition of slavery. In fact Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, made this very same argument. Also lots of countries had just as much invested in slavery. Look at how many slaves were in the British or French empires and they let them go without a war. This is just moral excuse making.

No the US and no other country needed slavery, ever.

I think their needs to be a distinction made between chattle slavery (what most of you think about when the word is used) and the general use of that term.
Chattle slaves are beaten and owned. A slave (especially true in the modern sense of the word in one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence) even in the modern sense can be owned, as they go indebt to the company and must continue to work for the company till the debt is paid.

That said if America didn't need slaves in some sense of the word right now, then why do agricultural job not have to comply with any of our current labor law governing minimum wage, child labor, workers comp nor meet any safty guidelines? All we've done is change the name from slave to migrant worker and all of the sudden people are willing to turn so blindly to this practice most of us have no idea/nor care that whole families can work from 4 in the morning till 8 at night 6 or 7 days a week for less than 1/2 the federal minimum wage. For instance a working family averages 17,500.00 per year. which comes out to 336.53 lets say a 5 day work week, which averages 8.41 per hour. Now divide that by 2 people that's 4.20 a person. IF they can find an hourly job. Most work is done by the field, which can have one break even with that 8.41 or more often times than not means less money per hour. (otherwise why pay by the field if paying by the hour was cheaper.) It all depends on physical condition, what was being picked, the weather and the support equipment condition.
I've worked in a field before and know first hand, and now my business is still tied (in part) to produce/bringing food to market, and nothing has changed.

http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-wo...low-wages/

We need cheap/free labor or our way of life even today does not work. All soceities are based on a big pyrmid scheme even the ones that pretend they aren't.

I agree with everything you said there, except that there is still an enormous difference between that and slavery.

[Godscreated]

Everyone here has made valid points about slavery and the Civil War, showing how complex these subjects are. They are connected and disconnected in the form of fighting a war to free them. As Dirch said and history records through Lincoln's writings, Lincoln's main concern was keeping the nation together and most people of the north didn't really wanted slavery abolished and of coarse the people of the south didn't want it abolished. The biggest reason the Civil War was fought, economics, money in the pocket of many off the backs of slaves. Cotton was the white gold for America, no other nation could supply cotton in the amount needed for the world, America had a monopoly of enormous value, so enormous it fueled the economy of the country. The bankers, freight companies (shipping by water), factories, the garment industry, and anything that used cotton were benefiting from the white gold and this reference is about the northern states. The northern states weren't interested in abolishing slavery because they were getting cotton at a very low price. The north wanted the Union to be intact because they knew that cotton would have become more expensive if the south formed a separate country and had more control over the prices of the cotton, plus the extra taxes associated with deals between two different countries. So money was the greatest driving force for the war, but no one at the time believed the war would destroy so much of the country and thus cost so much to rebuild that cotton prices would by necessity go much higher to pay for the rebuild of the south especially. When the damage became such as everyone knew it would cost so much to rebuild no matter who won, a new idea was needed for such devastation, freeing the slaves was the new old idea, it became the bigger reason for the war, why, because people needed something to make sense of what America had done to itself. So in reality the whole war had shifting meanings to the north, the south always fought for money and the ability to control that money. That's why the south came close to winning the war at one point, they had a common cause. The best thing that came out of the war was freedom for the slaves and as CapnA said if I'm not mistaken lead to inventions that helped replace the slaves and actually started a flurry of inventions that put this country back on track. Now even what I've stated is a very simple view of the war, there were many ideas with the individuals who fought and died in the war and to put all those individual reasons in perspective today would be an impossibility. 

GC

[Minimalist]

This is the odd bedfellows thread for sure as even G-C makes some good points.

During the war the British and French invested heavily in Egyptian cotton which while of lesser quality than American was available to keep the mills running.

There were many reasons for the war: on that I agree with G-C. Not the least of which was just the idea that it was something whose time had come. Again the whole country was surprised when First Bull Run did not settle the war and when the bloodbath that was Shiloh happened in 1862 a lot of people realized that they were totally and royally fucked.

[Minimalist]

See?  My best friend is a nutty baptist and as long as we stay off "religion" we never argue.